The Money Against The Minimum Wage

The minimum wage debate is back on Capitol Hill, and the usual suspects — trade groups in industries that hire a lot of low-wage workers — are howling.

Next week, the Senate is expected to vote on a bill by Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) that would increase the minimum wage to $10.10 across the country from its current level of $7.25.

In a March 31 letter, 20 trade associations that represent companies in the hotel, restaurant and other industries — including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the National Restaurant Association and the National Federation of Independent Business — wrote that “raising the minimum wage will be detrimental to job creation and low-skilled workers trying to get started on the economic ladder.”

The political heft of the opposing trade groups will certainly make it tougher to get the bill through both houses of Congress. The groups have laid out huge amounts of money for both lobbying expenditures and campaign contributions in recent years, giving more than $5.5 million to Congress over the past two election cycles and spending more than $91 million on lobbying just last year.

There has been a noticeable Republican tilt to the donations, matching the party’s general opposition to minimum wage hikes. Nearly 83 percent of the groups’ contributions to candidates in the 2012 and 2014 cycles went to the GOP, a total of more than $4.7 million.

Below is a list of the trade groups, showing how much they have donated in both the 2012 and 2014 election cycles so far and how much they spent on lobbying last year. The chart does not include independent expenditures by the groups, which in some cases are vast: The U.S. Chamber of Commerce was the largest outside spender on the list, shelling out more than $36 million in the 2012 elections and about $2 million so far in the 2014 mid-terms.

Robbie joined the Center for Responsive Politics as a reporting intern in January 2014. Before coming to CRP, Robbie worked in both print and radio journalism, first with the political factchecking website PolitiFact.com, and most recently as a public radio reporter in Cape Cod and Alaska. He is currently a senior at the University of Maryland and plans to graduate in May with a B.A. in journalism.

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